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I have a radical thought about how to
get around the Citizens United v FEC Supreme Court ruling with regard
to limiting corporate campaign contributions. If I understand the
ruling correctly, the issue is that no distinction is made, legally,
between a corporation and a person. But, then I realized something.
There is a distinction in the
U.S. Constitution between citizens and persons. Not all persons are
citizens.
The
Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are persons, but not
citizens. So, couldn't Congress pass a law restricting campaign
contributions of non-citizens? So long as court precedent is in
place, this would automatically restrict the campaign contributions
of corporations.
I'd
like to respond to a progressive (liberal) counter-argument that
I can foresee and explain why my fellow progressives would not need
to worry about it.
I can anticipate the argument that this would restrict the campaign
contributions of immigrants.
Let me
explain why we progressives wouldn't need to worry about this. A law
that restricted campaign contributions by corporations by restricting
those of non-citizens could have a high enough cap that most
immigrants would be unaffected. For example, if the cap was
$1,000,000, or even significantly less (or even $100,000 or possibly
even $10,000), few if any immigrants would actually be affected, but
corporations would be.
Moreover,
passing a law to cap campaign contributions by non-citizens would,
I'd imagine, be easier to pass and at a lower cap that the
restrictions specific to corporations that the Citizens United v FEC
ruling declared unconstitutional. This is because a limitation on
non-citizen campaign contributions would be a much less partisan
proposition to the American people. It would simply be a law about
increasing the integrity of the democratic process and, essentially,
making America more democratic. Who could fault anyone for that?
Because
it would have this broad popular appeal, we might even get the cap
much lower than it was even before the Citizens United v FEC ruling.
In fact, we'd actually be leveraging the ruling to make it happen! If it
went to the Supreme Court, they'd be backed into a corner because
of the Citizens United v FEC
ruling, because they've already ruled that corporations are persons.
Not
only that, but such a law would prevent extremely wealthy foreign
nationals, such as, say, the king of Saudi Arabia, from making
campaign contributions above a certain amount. If only citizens'
contributions are un-capped, only actual people people, as opposed to
corporate “persons”, and only American people people at that
would be able to contribute without restriction.
Most
importantly, I think that's how it should be. Why should non-voters
be able to affect our policy with money? Let's put power where it
was always intended by our Founders: in the hands of the People, not
those with the most money. This is a democracy, not an oligarchy,
after all.
Yours
truly,
Ivan
Richmond, Democrat, San Jose, California
